The book, now available for 99 cents in iTunes, weaves together a narrative stemming from the Army Corps of Engineers decision to breach the Birds Point levee, flooding more than 100,000 acres of land in an attempt to save the town of Cairo, Ill. Across 54 pages, the Beacon combines the text of its stories with slideshows, audio, interactive graphics, and video interviews to try to enhance the storytelling. “The text carries the basics and the meat of the story, but having all these extra elements to add to the book really make it stand out,” Brent Jones, the Beacon’s display editor, told me.

Jones assembled the book himself and described it as a mostly pain-free process, one he said even editors with little design knowledge could use. He relied heavily on the templates that Apple provides, but he says there’s plenty of flexibility for those with who want it. The workflow will look familiar to anyone with experience with other Apple apps like Keynote or Pages, he said.

Assembling the package was made easier by the fact that most of the flooding package was already assembled for a printed magazine product the site gives to its donors. Jones simply had to go back over the multimedia elements to see which would fit in the story and how they could be best used within the book. He decided to decouple an audio slideshow, for instance, splitting it into a solo slideshow and an audio track to use in a different part of the book.

“It all goes back to the story you’re trying to tell and making sure you’re using the new tool and all the features within that tool to support the story,” Jones said.

Jones said he downloaded the app on the night of the announcement and mocked up two pages of the book for his iPad. The next morning, he took the book into work to show his editors and got the green light. It took Jones about a week to put the book together, mostly working from home. (iBooks Author only runs on Mac OS X Lion, which Beacon computers didn’t have installed — but his personal machine at home did.) But after that things stalled for a bit. It took a little over two weeks for the book to go through Apple’s publishing process, which is known for being slower than, say, Amazon’s for the Kindle. Aside from having to provide the necessary information for payment and other authentication, Jones said he’s not sure why the process took as long as it did.

Still, the Beacon found it to be a relatively quick process that fit in fairly easily to its workflow. The Beacon isn’t placing any expectations on the ebook; it’s using it as a kind of test balloon to see if readers are willing to pay or if they like reading in the tablet format. As a wholly different media from the website, ebooks could offer a lot of opportunity for the type of work the Beacon does, Jones said. They just need to find out if there is an audience for it.

“It’s a good example of what we do — looking more deeply into stories and sticking with stories over a period of time,” Jones said.

While it’s a nice that someone might find an alternative form of revenue, the ultimate looser here is humanity at large.

Let’s all create books that are vendor locked! And maybe obsolete even on Apple’s own devices as short time as half an decade.

Anyone seeking to create a book, should look for open formats. Period. This locked out Apple culture is deemed to be a minor flick in the history of Books, and what is worse, it might end up creating a hole for the historians struggling to figure out all the formats of the past.

Nightshadevk

The Beacon also just switched to a redesigned website. Which IMO is horrid.

If you’re lucky enough to have the right deep-pocketed owner buy your paper and steady it, you’ve won the lottery. If you’re in a town whose paper is owned by the better chains, or committed local ownership, your loss will probably be mitigated. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.